Why Do People Want to Kill Their Own Meat?

Seriously.

These days, as we fetishize our food and the sourcing of our food more and more, there seems to be a growing fascination with killing or witnessing the death of one's meat that I find disturbing. I grew up with a sentimental attachment to animals yet an inability to give up meat. Having spent my childhood all over the Mediterranean, in rural hamlets and big cities, I always knew that the meat on my plate had been my neighbor's cute bunny or lamb that I'd cooed over a few days earlier. The butcher shops we went to usually had carcasses that hung off meat hooks attached to the ceiling, dripped blood onto the floor, and left little to the imagination. In other words, unlike so many of my contemporaries who grew up in suburban America, I was aware of the very real connection between the living, breathing, sentient cow, chicken, or pig and the act of violence necessary to nurture me at dinner time. I'm proud that I understand this connection, but I don't feel any particular urge to run around witnessing the death of my dinner as an act of absolution.

Last year, I participated in a group event on a farm with a bunch of disparate chefs where the pre-arranged, secret bonding experience was to watch a hog get killed and butchered before we cooked it for dinner that night. The rest of the group seemed to relish the experience. They found it an affirmation of their commitment to local and small farms, but I felt sick to my stomach as we stood around watching the pig bleed out, flopping around as its life slowly drained into the dirt.

I am all about supporting my local farms in any way I can, but I don't understand how watching the animal you're about to eat die is an effective way to demonstrate that support. I've seen animals killed both on a farm and in a slaughterhouse and it's always a gut wrenching experience that makes me question my commitment to eating meat no matter how skillful the act. It's a deeply unpleasant feeling to watch life ebb away—I hope it would be unpleasant for everyone—even if it's a necessary part of eating meat.

So I don't really follow the "cool chef" desire to be a part of that process. I don't understand the hipsters who take the animal slaughter "classes" that I've seen in Maine (backyard chickens) or Brooklyn (rabbits!). It seems fetishistic and twisted. I absolutely understand if you're truly out there raising your own animals for food. Then you need to be comfortable with killing them. What I don't understand is when killing an animal becomes a shared experience people want to witness just so they can say they did. People who seem so enthused about participating in the death of their meat remind me of the sick little boys I hated as a child, the ones who pulled the wings off of flies or bragged about blowing up lizards.

There was a voyeuristic feeling to our group as we watched the kill that seemed to me more disrespectful to the extinction of life than not watching would have been. Death was a spectacle. And this wasn't a lone example of the fascination with participating in the kill. It has become a key component of urban hipster farming. I think it has something to do with how far we've been removed from the sourcing and growing of our food that even a generation ago was far more prevalent than it is today.

To that end, I encourage people to garden and grow herbs on their fire escape. I encourage people to be aware of the fact that meat doesn't grow in plastic-wrapped Styrofoam packs. I'm all for understanding the connection between the soft, fuzzy, bleating lamb in the field and the lamp chop on your plate. But if you're not a farmer, I don't think you need to be an active participant in killing your meat. It's perverse to want to witness a killing simply for the virtue of experience.

This is The Spill, a new series on Eat Like a Man where chefs, food writers, restaurateurs, policy makers—anyone who has something vital, incendiary, or earth-shattering (or just kind of amusing) to say about the food world today—can write what's on their mind. If you work in the food industry and are interested in writing for The Spill, please send your ideas to spill@esquire.com.

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